Policy Surveillance:A New Tool for Public Health

Law is a powerful tool in improving population health. Laws can keep people safe and healthy by encouraging the use of seat belts or child restraint systems and by keeping our environment safe from toxins. Laws can also have important unintended effects, both positive and negative, on population health. Understanding how policies vary and how these variations develop over time is just as important to promoting population health as understanding the distribution and spread of disease or health risks. Policy surveillance, which is the systematic collection and analysis of laws and policies, allows us to create scientific data for evaluation, track the progress of health policy campaigns, spread policy innovations, and support the enhancement of policy capacity in the public health workforce and the community.

In a time of limited resources for public health work, proponents of public wider use of policy surveillance bear a burden of demonstrating its value and cost-effectiveness.  The emerging approach to policy surveillance represented in this panel aims meets this burden.  By any objective measure, law is an important facet of public health practice.  Numerous expert panels have recommended increasing legal capacity of public health agencies and personnel, and programs like the Network for Public Health Law and the CDC’s Public Health Law Program have shown the value of this investment.  Policy surveillance, practiced within a model of legal epidemiology, is efficient because the use of scientific research methods and the resources of the web allows the same legal research to serve many different needs.